Slack in the USSR

It's funny how some things just slip down the memory hole. It's now been more than a quarter of a century since the Soviet Union collapsed, so it feels like ancient history. It's completely intangible, and the world it inhabited is totally gone. We know the USSR failed, but does anyone think much about why and in what ways?

Lucky for us, Jose Luis Ricón has, in a series of posts, combed through the evidence on communist Russia's healthcare, GDP growth, and food consumption.

On healthcare, he concludes:

The Soviet healthcare system heavily underperformed most of the countries that we can use as meaningful comparatives. Relative to other countries that began from the same situation of poverty as the SU, its performance wasn’t better than the systems of those countries. After the 70s, health outcomes deteriorated, and the utter failure of the system became apparent.

Despite the high number of hospital beds and physicians, the Soviet Union wasn’t able to deliver better healthcare outcomes to its population, relative to developed countries, even though they made great improvements in the 20-50s era. This should make us wary of making hasty comparisons based just in some indicators instead of considering the bigger picture.

On GDP growth:

Given this data, the Soviet Union was the mediocre economy economists say it was, not a healthy, growing, superpower. If the USSR had an impact in the world, it was due to its size, natural resources, population, and strong military, not because it was more productive than other countries.

And on food consumption:

Was Soviet caloric intake higher than the US’?

No. In saying this, I’m saying the FAO is wrong, and that Robert Allen, who based his calculations in FAO data (and used their multipliers), didn’t notice. To say this, I had to go through a full literature review, and I come to this opinion. Before reading my post, you were totally justified in believing that caloric intake was higher. Not anymore. Unless some FAO official tells us why did they used their coefficients, that seem to go against the Sovietological literature.

Go read the whole things!